Michael Choi's Interview
ABOARD USS HOLO KAI, OFF THE COAST OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS Glider 7 looks more like a twin fuselage aircraft than a minisub. I lie on my stomach in the starboard hull, looking out through a thick, transparent nose cone. My pilot, Master Chief Petty Officer Michael Choi, waves at me from the port hull. Choi is one of the “old-timers,” possibly the most experienced diver in the U.S. Navy’s Deep Submergence Combat Corps (DSCC). His gray temples and weathered crow’s-feet clash violently with his almost adolescent enthusiasm. As the mother ship lowers us into the choppy Pacific, I detect a trace of “surfer dude” bleeding through Choi’s otherwise neutral accent. My war never ended. If anything, you could say it’s still escalating. Every month we expand our operations and improve our material and human assets. They say there are still somewhere between twenty and thirty million of them, still washing up on beaches, or getting snagged in fishermen’s nets. You can’t work an offshore oil rig or repair a transatlantic cable without running into a swarm. That’s what this dive is about: trying to find them, track them, and predict their movements so maybe we can have some advance warning. hit the whitecaps with a jarring thud. Choi grins, checks his instruments, and shifts the channels on his radio from me to the mother ship. The water before my observation dome froths white for a second, then gives way to light blue as we submerge. You’re not going to ask me about scuba gear or titanium shark suits, are you, because that crap’s got nothing to do with my war? Spear guns and bang sticks and zombie river nets…I can’t help you with any of that. If you want civilians, talk to civilians. But the military did use those methods. Only for brown water ops, and almost exclusively by army pukes. Personally, I’ve never worn a mesh suit or a scuba rig…well…at least not in combat. My war was strictly ADS. Atmospheric Diving Suit. Kind of like a space suit and a suit of armor all rolled into one. The technology actually goes back a couple hundred years, when some guy 1 invented a barrel with a faceplate and arm holes. After that you had stuff like the Tritonia and the Neufeldt-Kuhnke. They looked like something out of an old 1950s sci-fi movie, “Robby the Robot” and shit. It all kinda fell by the wayside when…do you really care about all this? Yes, please… Well, that sort of technology fell by the wayside when scuba was invented. It only made a comeback when divers had to go deep, real deep, to work on offshore oil rigs. You see…the deeper you go, the greater the pressure; the greater the pressure, the more dangerous it is for scuba or similar mixed-gas rigs. You’ve got to spend days, sometimes weeks, in a decompression chamber, and if, for some reason, you have to shoot up to the surface…you get the bends, gas bubbles in the blood, in the brain…and we’re not even talking about long-term health hazards like bone necrosis, soaking your body with shit nature never intended to be there. pauses to check his instruments. The safest way to dive, to go deeper, to stay down longer, was to enclose your whole body in a bubble of surface pressure. gestures to the compartments around us. Just like we are now—safe, protected, still on the surface as far as our bodies’ concerned. That’s what an ADS does, its depth and duration only limited by armor and life support. So it’s like a personal submarine? “Submersible.” A submarine can stay down for years, maintaining its own power, making its own air. A submersible can only make short duration dives, like World War II subs or what we’re in now. water begins to darken, deepening to a purplish ink. The very nature of an ADS, the fact that it’s really just a suit of armor, makes it ideal for blue and black water combat. I’m not knocking soft suits, you know, shark or other mesh rigs. They’ve got ten times the maneuverability, the speed, the agility, but they’re strictly shallow water at best, and if for some reason a couple of those f**kers get ahold of you…I’ve seen mesh divers with broken arms, broken ribs, three with broken necks. Drowning…if your air line was punctured or the regulator’s ripped out of your mouth. Even in a hard helmet on a mesh-lined dry suit, all they’d have to do is hold you down, let your air run out. I’ve seen too many guys go out that way, or else try to race for the surface and let an embolism finish what Zack started. Did that happen a lot to mesh suit divers? Sometimes, especially in the beginning, but it never happened to us. There was no risk of physical danger. Both your body and your life support are encased in a cast-aluminum or high-strength composite shell. Most models’ joints are steel or titanium. No matter which way Zack turned your arms, even if he managed to get a solid grip, which is hard considering how smooth and round everything is, it was physically impossible to break off a limb. If for some reason you need to jet up to the surface, just jettison your ballast or your thruster pack, if you had one…all suits are positively buoyant. They pop right up like a cork. The only risk might be if Zack were clinging to you during the ascent. A couple times I’ve had buddies surface with uninvited passengers hanging on for dear life…or undeath. Chuckles. Balloon ascents almost never happened in combat. Most ADS models have forty-eight hours emergency life support. No matter how many Gs dog-piled you, no matter if a hunk of debris came crumbling down or your leg got snagged in an underwater cable, you could sit tight, snug and safe, and just wait for the cavalry. No one ever dives alone, and I think the longest any ADS diver has ever had to cool his heels was six hours. There were times, more than I can count on my fingers, where one of us would get snagged, report it, then follow up by saying that there was no immediate danger, and that the rest of the team should assist only after accomplishing their mission. You say ADS models. Was there more than one type? We had a bunch: civilian, military, old, new…well…relatively new. We couldn’t build any wartime models, so we had to work with what was already available. Some of the older ones dated back to the seventies, the JIMs and SAMs. I’m really glad I never had to operate any of those. They only had universal joints and portholes instead of a face bowl, at least on the early JIMs. I knew one guy, from the British Special Boat Service. He had these mondo blood blisters all along his inner thighs from where the JIM’s leg joints pinched his skin. Kick-ass divers, the SBS, but I’d never swap jobs with them. We had three basic U.S. Navy models: the Hardsuit 1200, the 2000, and the Mark 1 Exosuit. That was my baby, the exo. You wanna talk about sci-fi, this thing looked like it was made to fight giant space termites. It was much slimmer than either of the two hardsuits, and light enough that you could even swim. That was the major advantage over the hardsuit, actually over all other ADS systems. To be able to operate above your enemy, even without a power sled or thruster packs, that more than made up for the fact that you couldn’t scratch your itches. The hardsuits were big enough to allow your arms to be pulled into the central cavity to allow you to operate secondary equipment. What kind of equipment? Lights, video, side scanning sonar. The hardsuits were full-service units, exos were the bargain basement. You didn’t have to worry about a lot of readouts and machinery. You didn’t have any of the distractions or the multitasking of the hardsuits. The exo was sleek and simple, allowing you to focus on your weapon and the field in front of you. What kind of weapons did you use? At first we had the M-9, kind of a cheap, modified, knockoff of the Russian APS. I say “modified” because no ADS had anything close to resembling hands. You either had four-pronged claws or simple, industrial pincers. Both worked as hand-to-hand weapons—just grab a G’s head and squeeze—but they made it impossible to fire a gun. The M-9 was fixed to your forearm and could be fired electrically. It had a laser pointer for accuracy and air-encased cartridges that fired these four-inch-long steel rods. The major problem was that they were basically designed for shallow water operations. At the depth we needed, they imploded like eggshells. About a year in we got a much more efficient model, the M-11, actually invented by the same guy who invented both the hardsuit and exo. I hope that crazy Canuck got an assload of medals for what he’s done for us. The only problem with it was that DeStRes thought production was too expensive. They kept telling us that between our claws and preexisting construction tools, we had more than enough to handle Zack. What changed their minds? Troll. We were in the North Sea, repairing that Norwegian natural gas platform, and suddenly there they were…We’d expected some kind of attack—the noise and light of the construction site always attracted at least a handful of them. We didn’t know a swarm was nearby. One of our sentries sounded off, we headed for his beacon, and we were suddenly inundated. Horrible thing to fight hand-to-hand underwater. The bottom churns up, your visibility is shot, like fighting inside a glass of milk. Zombies don’t just die when you hit them, most of the time they disintegrate, fragments of muscle, organ, brain matter, mixed up with the silt and swirling around you. Kids today…fuckin’ A, I sound like my pops, but it’s true, the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have this “ZeVDeK”—Zero Visibility Detection Kit—with color-imaging sonar and low-light optics. The picture is relayed through a heads-up display right on your face bowl like a fighter plane. Throw in a pair of stereo hydrophones and you’ve got a real sensory advantage over Zack. That was not the case when I first went exo. We couldn’t see, we couldn’t hear—we couldn’t even feel if a G was trying to grab us from behind. Why was that? Because the one fundamental flaw of an ADS is complete tactile blackout. The simple fact that the suit is hard means you can’t feel anything from the outside world, even if a G has his hands right on you. Unless Zack is actively tugging, trying to pull you back or flip you around, you may not know he’s there until his face is right up against yours. That night at Troll…our helmet lights only made the problem worse by throwing up a glare that was only broken by an undead hand or face. That was the only time I was ever spooked…not scared, you understand, just spooked, swinging in this liquid chalk and suddenly a rotting face is jammed against my face bowl. The civilian oil workers, they wouldn’t go back to work, even under threat of reprisals, until we, their escorts, were better armed. They’d lost enough of their people already, ambushed out of the darkness. Can’t imagine what that must have been like. You’re in this dry suit, working in near pitch-black, eyes stinging from the light of the welding torch, body numb from the cold or else burning from the hot water pumped through the system. Suddenly you feel these hands, or teeth. You struggle, call for help, try to fight or swim as they pull you up. Maybe a few body parts will rise to the surface, maybe they’ll just pull up a severed lifeline. That was how the DSCC came into being as an official outfit. Our first mission was to protect the rig divers, keep the oil flowing. Later we expanded to beachhead sanitation and harbor clearing. What is beachhead sanitation? Basically, helping the jarheads get ashore. What we learned during Bermuda, our first amphibious landing, was that the beachhead was coming under constant attack by Gs walking out of the surf. We had to establish a perimeter, a semicircular net around the proposed landing area that was deep enough for ships to pass over, but high enough to keep out Zack. That’s where we came in. Two weeks before the landings took place, a ship would anchor several miles offshore and start banging away with their active sonar. That was to draw Zack away from the beach. Wouldn’t that sonar also lure in zombies from deeper water? The brass told us that was an “acceptable risk.” I think they didn’t have anything better. That’s why it was an ADS op, too risky for mesh divers. You knew that masses were gathering under that pinging ship, and that once they went silent, you’d be the brightest target out there. It actually turned out to be the closest thing we ever had to a cakewalk. The attack frequency was the lowest by far, and when the nets were up, they had an almost perfect success rate. All you needed was a skeleton force to keep a constant vigil, maybe snipe the occasional G that tried to climb the fence. They didn’t really need us for this kind of op. After the first three landings, they went back to using mesh divers. And harbor clearing? That was not a cakewalk. That was in the final stages of the war, when it wasn’t just about opening a beachhead, but reopening harbors for deepwater shipping. That was a massive, combined operation: mesh divers, ADS units, even civilian volunteers with nothing but a scuba rig and a spear gun. I helped clear Charleston, Norfolk, Boston, freakin’ Boston, and the mother of all subsurface nightmares, the Hero City. I know grunts like to bitch about fighting to clear a city, but imagine a city underwater, a city of sunken ships and cars and planes and every kind of debris imaginable. During the evacuation, when a lot of container ships were trying to make as much room as they could, a lot of them dumped their cargo overboard. Couches, toaster ovens, mountains and mountains of clothes. Plasma TVs always crunched when you walked over them. I always imagined it was bone. I also imagined I could see Zack behind each washer and dryer, climbing over each pile of smashed air conditioners. Sometimes it was just my imagination, but sometimes…The worst…the worst was having to clear a sunken ship. There were always a few that had gone down within the harbor boundaries. A couple, like the Frank Cable, big sub tender turned refugee ship, had gone down right at the mouth of the harbor. Before she could be raised, we had to do a compartment-by-compartment sweep. That was the only time the exo ever felt bulky, unwieldy. I didn’t smack my head in every passageway, but it sure as hell felt like it. A lot of the hatches were blocked by debris. We either had to cut our way through them, or through the decks and bulkheads. Sometimes the deck had been weakened by damage or corrosion. I was cutting through a bulkhead above the Cable’s engine room when suddenly the deck just collapsed under me. Before I could swim, before I could think…there were hundreds of them in the engine room. I was engulfed, drowning in legs and arms and hunks of meat. If I ever had a recurring nightmare, and I’m not saying I do, because I don’t, but if I did, I’d be right back in there, only this time I’m completely na**d…I mean I would be. am surprised at how quickly we reach the bottom. It looks like a desert wasteland, glowing white against the permanent darkness. I see the stumps of wire coral, broken and trampled by the living dead. There they are. look up to see the swarm, roughly sixty of them, walking out of the desert night. And here we go. maneuvers us above them. They reach up for our searchlights, eyes wide and jaws slack. I can see the dim red beam of the laser as it settles on the first target. A second later, a small dart is fired into its chest. And one… centers his beam on a second subject. And two… moves down the swarm, tagging each one with a nonlethal shot. Kills me not to kill them. I mean, I know the whole point is to study their movements, set up an early warning network. I know that if we had the resources to clear them all we would. Still… darts a sixth target. Like all the others, this one is oblivious to the small hole in its sternum. How do they do it? How are they still around? Nothing in the world corrodes like saltwater. These Gs should have gone way before the ones on land. Their clothes sure did, anything organic like cloth or leather. figures below us are practically na**d. So why not the rest of them? Is it the temperature at these depths, is it the pressure? And why do they have such a resistance to pressure anyway? At this depth the human nervous system should be completely Jell-O-ized. They shouldn’t even be able to stand, let alone walk and “think” or whatever their version of thinking is. How do they do it? I’m sure someone real high up has all the answers and I’m sure the only reason they don’t tell me is… is suddenly distracted by a flashing light on his instrument panel. Hey, hey, hey. Check this out. look down at my own panel. The readouts are incomprehensible. We got a hot one, pretty healthy rad count. Must be from the Indian Ocean, Iranian or Paki, or maybe that ChiCom attack boat that went down off Manihi. How about that? fires another dart. You’re lucky. This is one of the last manned recon dives. Next month it’s all ROV, 100 percent Remotely Operated Vehicles. There’s been a lot of controversy over the use of ROVs for combat. Never happen. The Sturge’s 2 got way too much star power. She’d never let Congress go ’droid on us. Is there any validity to their argument? What, you mean if robots are more efficient fighters than ADS divers? Hell no. All that talk about “limiting human casualties” is bullshit. We never lost a man in combat, not one! That guy they keep talking about, Chernov, he was killed after the war, on land, when he got wasted and passed out on a tram line. Fuckin’ politicians. Maybe ROVs are more cost-effective, but one thing they’re not is better. I’m not just talking about artificial intelligence; I’m talking heart, instinct, initiative, everything that makes us us. That’s why I’m still here, same with the Sturge, and almost all the other vets who took the plunge during the war. Most of us are still involved because we have to be, because they still haven’t yet come up with a collection of chips and bits to replace us. Believe me, once they do, I’ll not only never look at an exosuit again, I’ll quit the navy and pull a full-on Alpha November Alpha. What’s that? Action in the North Atlantic, this old, black-and-white war flick. There’s a guy in it, you know the “Skipper” from Gilligan’s Island, his old man. 3 He had a line…“I’m putting an oar on my shoulder and I’m starting inland. And the first time a guy says to me ‘What’s that on your shoulder?’ that’s where I’m settling for the rest of my life.” Category:Interviews